The Russia Hack and the Challenge to American Democracy

When the F.B.I. called the Democratic National Committee in early fall 2015 and said they suspected a foreign state was inside the D.N.C.’s computers, few paid attention or thought it was anything out of the ordinary. Two years later, we regard it as a defining moment in the use of cyber as a weapon of influence, just as Stuxnet was a defining moment in the use of cyber as a source of destruction. David E. Sanger, national security correspondent for the New York Times and a member of the team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work on how the Russia hack unfolded, takes on both the remarkable story of the operation and its implications. Suddenly we are asking what will be vulnerable next time, and whether we are about to enter a sea change in how nations compete in the cyber realm. He looks both backward and forward, asking why the United States was so unprepared - and whether political speech on social media may soon be regulated. And, as the correspondent who told the world the story of “Olympic Games,” the American code name for the Stuxnet attacks, he asks whether governments have begun to understand how cyber power will affect the underpinnings of democracy.